Real Readers Research Articles

English

No one can argue against the fact that the first thing that will keep the reader wanting to complete reading or to reread a literary text is the aesthetic experience that the work affords. This can be noticed when the perceiver faces any successful work of art. There is a sense of amusement and excitement (an aesthetic experience). This experience is emergent, formed as a result of the artistic value of the work. One of the elements comprising the artistic value is the moral dimension. Poems, and indeed any art work may hold moral value which will affect the experience of receiving them. The concept of moral value and its relation to aesthetic value in some art forms has been discussed by many scholars. This paper discusses the merit of Noel Carrol’s theory, moderate moralism. It then displays the moral virtues and defects of lyrics from two Bob Dylan’s songs, Masters of War and Neighbourhood Bully on the real readers’ aesthetic experience by using insights from moderate moralism, to establish the relationships between moral defects and virtues and their aesthetic value. Keywords: aesthetics; morality; Dylan; reader response; poetry

Steinbeck Today

Steinbeck Today

Examining the Role of the Reader: A Necessary Task for Catholic Biblical Interpretation

Thanks to the explosion of methods and hermeneutical frameworks that have surfaced in biblical studies since the 1970s, the discipline looks very different today than when Catholic scholars were first openly permitted to engage it. Among these approaches are those that foreground the complex role the real flesh-and-blood reader plays in interpretation. Recent discussion on what makes biblical interpretation “Catholic” reveals it to be a contested topic. Through an analysis of the Pontifical Biblical Commission'sThe Interpretation of the Bible in the Churchand Frank M. Yamada's article “What Does Manzanar Have to Do with Eden? A Japanese American Interpretation of Genesis 2–3,” the present article enters the discussion over what constitutes Catholic biblical interpretation to argue that it must integrate hermeneutical approaches that foreground real readers within the context of lived realities.

Text World Theory and real world readers: From literature to life in a Belfast prison.

Cognitive stylistics offers a range of frameworks for understanding (amongst other things) what producers of literary texts ‘do’ with language and how they ‘do’ it. Less prevalent, however, is an understanding of the ways in which these same frameworks offer insights into what readers ‘do’ (and how they ‘do’ it). Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007; Whiteley, 2011) has proved useful for understanding how and why readers construct mental representations engendered by the act of reading. However, research on readers’ responses to literature has largely focused on an ‘idealised’ reader or an ‘experimental’ subject-reader often derived from within the academy and conducted using contrived or amended literary fiction. Moreover, the format of traditional book groups (participants read texts privately and discuss them at a later date) as well as online community forums such as Goodreads, means that such studies derive data from post-hoc, rather than real-time textual encounters and discussions. The current study is the first of its kind in analysing real-time reading contexts with real readers during a researcher-led literary project (‘read.live.learn’) in Northern Ireland’s only female prison. In doing so, the study is unique in addressing experimental and post hoc bias. Using Text World Theory, the paper considers the personal and social impact of reader engagement in the talk of the participants. As such, it has three interrelated aims: to argue for the social and personal benefits of reading stylistically rich literature in real-time reading groups; to demonstrate the efficacy of stylistics for understanding how those benefits come about, and to demonstrate the inter-disciplinary value of stylistics, particularly its potential for traversing traditional research parameters.

Practical criticism: An early experiment in reader response

My article provides historical background to stylisticians’ current interest in empirical approaches to literary response by investigating the practical criticism experiment that IA Richards carried out in the 1920s and that he reported on in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929). In literary studies, practical criticism is typically regarded as a method of reading that focuses on the text itself and that isolates the text from its social and historical context. Yet, Richards’ technique of issuing his student audiences with anonymized and unknown poems, and asking them for their written responses (or ‘protocols’), was explicitly part of a psychological experiment and not a model of how we should, or even could, read literature. And he was primarily – if not exclusively – interested in the responses of his readers to the poem and not in the poem itself. I have argued that Richards’ technique of practical criticism was the very first large-scale experiment in psychology conducted to discover how real readers understand, interpret and evaluate literary texts. As such, the experiment anticipated the relatively recent turn among stylisticians towards empirical research, and might still be able to inform that research. In this article, I compare Richards’ experiment with the psychological and aesthetic experiments that had been conducted beforehand. I then describe in detail what Richards actually did in his experiment, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of his methodology. Finally, I assess some of the ways in which Richards’ experiment might inform empirical research in stylistics today.

Reading S. across Media: Transmedia Storyworlds, Multimodal Fiction, and Real Readers

Using J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (2013) as its case study, this article explores multimodal fiction and transmedia storyworlds. Conceptualizations of transmedia storytelling have sought to emphasize not only the creation and distribution of narrative worlds across media but also the imaginative construction of these worlds by recipients. Nevertheless, this latter characteristic has been somewhat neglected in terms of empirical research. This article seeks to redress that neglect in relation to printed multimodal fiction, by using real reader data to gain insight into how readers engage with such transmedia, transfictional storyworlds. The analysis at the heart of the article progresses outwards from an exploration of the central multimodal text, S., to consider its wider transmedia network and the narrative experience it offers readers. Ultimately, the article makes two original contributions to the study of transmedia narratives and the multimodal novel. Firstly, it considers how various media texts within a transmedia network (with a multimodal printed novel at its center) together create a transfictional storyworld; secondly, it explores how real readers experience such storyworlds.

Reconsidering second-person narration and involvement

The literature on second-person narration invariably mentions involvement as a special effect of you-narration on readers. This is arguably achieved because you-narration employs direct address and thus ‘communicates’ with real readers. I argue that one needs to take into consideration the second-person pronoun’s occurrence in, and its interplay with, a given discourse context. Using grammatical and narratological description, and drawing on a contemporary fictional example, this paper proposes that a distinction be made between affective-emotional involvement and aesthetic-reflexive involvement. It is hypothesized that it is the collocation of you with lexical items such as emotive verbs and with narrative techniques creating an interior perspective that creates a sense of experientiality and thus triggers emotional responses. Likewise, readers’ feeling of being addressed is shown to be attributable to the ‘interpersonal semiotic’ in various grammatical constructions, rather than to the usage of the second-person pronoun alone. The address function seems to be tied to the postmodern playfulness of you and readers’ aesthetic-reflexive involvement in this.

Contexto, Conhecimento Enciclopédico e a Construção de Inferências Metonímicas e Metafóricas

Resumo: Este artigo faz parte do projeto de pesquisa que tem por objetivo central investigar empiricamente o que a metáfora realmente significa para leitores reais. A investigação tem sido realizada com metodologia interpretativista, tendo como método principal o Pensar Alto em Grupo, que é uma prática dialógica vivenciada por vários grupos de leitores, constituindo, assim, um estudo de caso coletivo. Nos dois estudos de caso realizados, ocorreu uma complexa interação de inferências metonímicas e metafóricas na construção das leituras. Desse achado emergiram novas questões de pesquisa, que serão focalizadas neste trabalho: “Qual o papel dos contextos evocados e dos conhecimentos ativados pelos leitores na construção das inferências metonímicas e metafóricas?”; e “Qual o papel da metonímia conceptual na construção dos sentidos?” Para responder a essas questões, foram analisados e discutidos os dados de um grupo do segundo estudo de caso.

Review

Reviewed by: Entranced by Story: Brain, Tale, and Teller from Infancy to Old Age by Hugh Crago Marek Oziewicz (bio) Entranced by Story: Brain, Tale, and Teller from Infancy to Old Age. By Hugh Crago. New York: Routledge, 2014. 269pp. Entranced by Story is a fascinating account of the evolution of the storytelling brain in its seven developmental stages: early childhood, preschool childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, maturity, and old age. Because most chapters concern stories we tell or read between childhood and young adolescence, it would seem that Hugh Crago’s argument is of particular relevance to students of children’s literature. The overall focus, however, makes this book eye-opening to anyone interested in how stories engage real readers. Crago’s premise is that the structure of the human brain explains surprisingly many aspects of the literary experience. The key lies in grasping the interaction of the two hemispheres and the relationship among the three layers of the brain, which perceive and represent the world in fundamentally different ways. Crago coins the term Old Brain to describe the archaic functions of our prehuman brains mediated mostly by the right hemisphere as they operate as and in stories. New Brain, in turn, is his term for the more detached and self-conscious experience of the world—and narrative—offered by the cortex and mediated predominantly by the left hemisphere. This framework of Old and New Brains in extremely complex interaction is the lens that Crago applies to examine the stories we are attracted to at different stages of our lives. [End Page 124] Chapter 1 looks at songstries and narratives composed by 2- to 4- year-olds, presenting them as quintessential Old Brain creations: concerned with the here and now, external actions, repetition, and formulas. Chapter 2 moves to stories that attract preschoolers, in which 4- to 5-year-olds begin to grapple with existential threats but remain dominated by Old Brain patterns. By middle childhood, the focus of Chapter 3, 7- to 9-year-olds have already made the Piagetan shift to the standards of realism, but the most appealing stories for this age group either describe “places of greater safety” (88) or offer what Crago calls “‘outlift’—the experience of being ‘taken out of oneself’ . . . into something strange, intense, and gratifying” (86). In Chapter 4 Crago deals with the special affinity between adolescence and romance—both as a search for love but also as a quest for the meaning of one’s life. The stories of young adulthood, examined in Chapter 5, reflect “the ebullience, the optimism, and the self confidence of young adulthood” (121). It is during this period that the New Brain finally comes into its own, so paradoxically young adults are also drawn to stories where wrongs are not righted and dreams do not come true. Chapter 6 deals with stories we create in midlife, as we are pulled back into our own pasts to recreate our own, “wish-we-had” childhoods. Chapter 7, finally, deals with storytelling in old age, when even mentally healthy people are drawn toward stories “like the Old-Brain-dominated narratives of early childhood” (192). This trajectory of the rise and fall of our storytelling capacities implies that we start with Old Brain narratives, develop the ability to enjoy New Brain narratives in young adulthood—when our cognitive and physical powers are at their peak—and then regress into Old Brain patterns again. Why is the Old Brain so dominant in the field of stories? Crago’s answer is that entranced reading—like its flip side, inspired writing—is essentially an Old Brain phenomenon that sweeps us into something bigger than we are. Our brains are hardwired for story-generated experiences of “immersion in a dramatic, significant present-ness” (222), and this immersion, according to Crago, can best be experienced through traditional tales. In his 2003 “What Is a Fairy Tale?” Crago asserted that the genre works through its effect and posited a close match between the fairy-tale consciousness and the level of consciousness displayed by children in Piaget’s pre-operational stage. In Entranced by Story, especially Chapters 1 to 3, he expands this claim, suggesting...

Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature by Sara K. Day (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature by Sara K. Day Lisa Rowe Fraustino (bio) Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature. By Sara K. Day. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Given its mission “ To encourage high standards of criticism, scholarship, research, and teaching in children’s literature,” the Children’s Literature Association has always pursued a publishing agenda, beginning with proceedings from the early conferences. From 1985 through 2006, ChLA-sponsored books were published through an affiliation with Scarecrow Press and included the now discontinued Touchstones and Phoenix Award series, as well as the Centennial Studies series and individual general studies titles that remain part of the new publishing program of the Children’s Literature Association series with the University Press of Mississippi. Sara K. Day’s well-written and meticulously organized first book, Reading Like a Girl, is the second title published in this new series and lives up to the ChLA’s goal “to publish innovative, insightful literary criticism” (childlitassn.org). Day coins the term “narrative intimacy” to analyze the ways in which first-person female narrators in contemporary American young adult fiction draw readers—primarily adolescent women—into an imagined relationship that situates the reader as confidante. She defines narrative intimacy as a rhetorical situation that “draws attention to the ways in which the roles of author, narrator, and reader are all shaped by their positioning in either the real world or a fictional space” (13). Day establishes these concepts as the underlying framework for her study in chapter 1, “‘She Is a Creature Designed for Reading’: Narrative Intimacy and the Adolescent Woman Reader.” In chapter 2, “‘Opening Myself Like a Book to the Spine’: Disclosure and Discretion in Constructions of Friendship,” Day discusses the “double-edged sword concept as the dominant cultural understanding of adolescent women’s friendships” (34). In disclosing her inner thoughts and feelings—including those she withholds from characters in the novel—the first-person narrator implicitly situates the reader as an intimate friend. Thus “narrative intimacy becomes a lens through which to recognize flaws in the narrator’s relationships with her (fictional) friends—flaws that almost always return to questions of disclosure and discretion” (35). Day traces this pattern in Sarah Dessen’s Keeping the Moon, Natasha Friend’s Perfect, Stephanie Hemphill’s Things Left Unsaid, Siobhan Vivian’s A Little Friendly Advice, Lizabeth Zindel’s The [End Page 296] Secret Rites of Social Butterflies, and E. Lockhart’s Ruby Oliver series, arguing that “each of these novels constructs the role of the reader as friend, even as the construction of this role may draw attention to or deny constructions of disclosure within friendships as difficult or dangerous” (35). The chapter concludes, “The very boundary between fictional narrator and real reader that is blurred by direct address and anticipation of reader’s responses therefore actively reinforces contradictory messages about intimacy” (63). In chapter 3, “‘He Couldn’t Get Close Enough’: The Exploration and Relegation of Desire,” Day expands the notion of narrative intimacy in female friendships to “the reader as a welcome voyeur” of romantic relationships (76). Examining Judy Blume’s Forever, Dessen’s Someone Like You, Kristen Tracy’s Lost It, Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, and Rachel Cohn’s Cyd Charisse trilogy, Day finds that “even as narrative intimacy offers a location to explore desire and love, it echoes traditional warnings about the potential physical and emotional threats posed by sexual activity and reinforces the ambiguous discourse of readiness surrounding adolescent sex” (90). Day posits that “the narrator-reader relationship is in and of itself a didactic tool that echoes the traditional demands about love and sex faced by adolescent women in contemporary American culture” (99). The discussion of romance transitions to a discussion of the ramifications of narrative intimacy in books with themes of sexual violation and trauma in chapter 4, “‘She Doesn’t Say a Word’: Violations and Reclamations of Intimacy.” In such texts, Day claims, narrators “primarily treat the reader as a therapist of sorts, relying on the implication of confidentiality in order to reclaim rather...

PSIHONARATOLOŠKI PRISTUP ISPITIVANJU KNJIŽEVNOSTI

Empirijski pristupi ispitivanju književnosti razvili su se tokom pro- teklih tridesetak godina, uglavnom na bazi teorija usmerenih na čitaoca i u sprezi sa različitim naukama poput psihologije, sociologije, neuronauka i drugih. Iako grupe autora imaju raznorodne ciljeve i metode istraživanja, ono što ih povezuje je empirijsko i dosledno ispitivanje jasnih hipoteza o čitanju uz korišćenje stvarnih čitalaca. U ovom radu predstavljen je jedan od empirijskih pristupa ispitivanju književnosti, psihonarato- logija, koja je pokušaj da se sačini teorijski okvir specifičan za empirijsko ispitivanje književnosti. Psihonaratologija svoje osnovne termine, principe i hipoteze crpi iz nara- tologije i kognitivne psihologije, oblasti koja se bavi time kako naš kognitivni sistem bira, osmišljava, skladišti i koristi informacije. Pored ovog, koristi se i znanjima iz lingvi- stike, analize diskursa, statistike i drugim. U radu je prikazan i pregled glavnih istraži- vačkih problema psihonaratologije. Iako je psihonaratologija najobuhvatniji teorijsko-metodološki okvir u oblasti empirijsko-eksperimentalnog ispitivanja književnosti i velik korak napred u ovom polju, ona ipak nije obuhvatna ni kada su u pitanju svi oblici književne umetnosti, ni kada su u pitanju svi aspekti čitanja književnog teksta. Pored ovog, zamerka koja se psihonara- tologiji može uputiti jeste ta što tekstualni eksperiment koji ona predlaže stavlja pod znak pitanja umetničku vrednost izlaganih stimulusa.

Sequence and Lyric Narrative in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War

but are in retrospect better described by alterity. Its structural and rhetorical casuistries demand that we compare the rhetorical purposes of its sections to one another. Because the promise of coherence is only rescinded at the end of the book, the alternative chronologies of each of the different generic subsections can fruitfully be compared (there is no ultimate reason to prefer Auden’s sonnet sequence to Isherwood’s “Travel-Diary,” although many critics do). Moreover, my reading suggests that a limit-case like Journey to a War, composed of instantaneous lyrical fragments, can further expand current rhetorical theories of narrative within poetry and of lyric-narrative progression in particular. By all accounts made by real readers (contemporary reviews, Auden’s own later reassessment, Auden’s late-career embarrassment, etc.), judgment of the authors and their encounters occurs throughout the text as well as via retrospective assessment of the project. Tracking those judgments as they occur, and relating them to the text’s peculiar habit of eliciting hostile reactions to its mission, is integral to understanding the book’s structure and the rhetoric of its aspirations. Only once we recognize the weak narrativity of Journey to a War and modify our current understanding of how judgments drive readerly progression through lyricnarrative hybrids, can we begin to theorize its humane attempt to intervene in the Sino-Japanese conflict. Lyric Instantaneity and Montage Poetry criticism is at best ill-equipped to discuss poetic narrative; critics forfend talk of story by focusing largely on characterization, insisting that lyric speakers are utterly distinct from narrators, and that if those speakers accidentally narrate events, any consideration of their causal association should be subsumed to the greater understanding their rhetorical relation reveals about the speaker. As a genre, lyric is best known for the suggestion of intimacy between poet and audience. That intimacy has long been understood as the convention of lyric instantaneity—that no time passes over the course of a lyric, regardless of its length. Literary glossaries emphasize the ephemerality of the form, creating a context through which to read any slightly-longer-than-instantaneous utterance as if it transpired within an instant. A typical lyric, like “Yesterday” by the Beatles, may contain descriptions of prior events, but contains no narrative to speak of: the story behind Paul’s breakup with his unspecified paramour may be inferred, but within the “today” of the song’s recording, the persona is more concerned with bemoaning the fact that “she had to go” than finding out why (the lament that “she wouldn’t say” indicates his frustration with his beloved’s intransigence rather than prompting the reader to guess at her reasons for rejecting him). “Yesterday” circles repetitively around a single evocation of sadness and loss, and never progresses beyond it (indeed, why should it?); through several refrains, our acquaintance with his sullen loneliness becomes more and more profound. Time passes as one reads a lyric, but not within the world it conveys; any events mentioned are related retrospectively, because action is understood to exist outside of, or beyond the limited scope of, or superfluously beneath the interests of the lyric poem.

Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture

Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture

Capital sur by Eduardo Del Campo (review)

Reviewed by: Capital sur by Eduardo Del Campo Steven Mills Del Campo, Eduardo. Capital sur. Sevilla, Spain: Paréntesis, 2011. Pp. 424. ISBN 978-84- 9919-199-7. In the face of global recessions, high inflation, political unrest, and new perspectives on the Other in our modern society, Capital sur hits home as an engaging and globally relevant piece of fiction. For anyone interested in modern or twenty-first-century Spanish culture, society, [End Page 804] identity, literature, art, and so forth, del Campo writes a novel that depicts the problems and impacts of the deep recession in Seville, Spain in the 1990s. Capital sur is at once a critique of high society, a discussion of clashing perspectives during globalization, and an engaging story with both robust characters worthy of discussion and more stylized characters that typify the various social classes. As a piece of fiction, the value of Capital sur lies in the plot and compilation of characters that lend themselves to a variety of readers who will discover a text that is both provocative and entertaining. Taking place in the mid 1990s, the novel follows the actions, perspectives and frustrations of several people representing diverse socioeconomic and educational backgrounds in Seville, Spain. Each of them exhibits unique methods of coping with the devastating recession in which they live, allowing the depth of each character to emerge as they confront related pressures while working through their own personal problems. Shifts in focalization give detailed insights into each of the characters, but the subtle, abrupt, or untagged nature of these shifts also forces the reader to decipher the context clues. For example, Diego, a journalist, investigates and reports on various situations, thus depicting many of the problems in Seville during the recession. While struggling with his own potential unemployment and desires for a house and a stable future, Diego documents Salvador, a drug addict, who is released from prison in order to die with his family. Diego chronicles Salvador’s rapid physical decline because of both AIDS and the effects of his lingering addiction. Del Campo also uses Diego’s perspective to construct, through friends, examples of victims of the social crisis: from the unemployed and uneducated to the idealistic yet hopeless university student, all who face the effects of a dead economy. In Diego’s travels, as well as in the adventures of other characters, del Campo questions many of society’s norms and perspectives as Spain prepares for the twenty first century. For example, in Diego’s portrayal of Salvador, rather than criminalizing an inmate and marginalizing an addict, he paints a struggling soul through sympathy and empathy, allowing both the fictional reader and the real reader a connection with the other’s desires, emotions, and regrets. This makes Salvador a tragic hero, the Other with whom the readers must connect, as Diego would argue. Another, much like Salvador, is Antonia, a prostitute, who, rather than living alienated because of a moral laxity, turns her practice into a viable profession. Carrying an illegitimate child, she escapes the ridicule of her conservative community twenty years before the events in Capital sur begin by abandoning her baby and walking into the streets of Seville. She learns to recognize when and where to advertise her services in order to increase her clientele, which, when combined with an understanding of trends of supply, demand, and competition, has allowed her to maximize profits. In the depths of a devastating recession, Antonia can claim more financial stability than some of the others who must sell themselves to other demoralizing jobs to merely make ends meet (such as an art school model, dispersing useless pamphlets to uninterested people, or other dehumanizing and dangerous lines work). This sort of irony about alternative economies permeates the novel and casts a tragic air, forcing both characters and readers to question acceptable social values and practices, especially as the upper and mid to lower classes clash at various points throughout the novel. Del Campo includes an international critique through a subplot in which a moviemaker from the United States plans to use the city for a scene in an upcoming film. Promising quick and easy money for locals as...

Letramento literário: formação do leitor de literatura em tempos de transição paradigmática

This text is a chapter of our Master Thesis and discusses from the theoretical point of view that literature’s images of readers are promoted by some works which are concerned by literary literacy’s concept. These works have as aim to verify if they consider the real reader – whom is actually in elementary classrooms -, or the ideal reader – idealized by theoretical studies which are related to this type of reader -. The research is concerned into literature pedagogy field and it considers the emergent thought of complexity paradigm as well as transdisciplinarity. However, enlighten by the view of literary specificities, we bring to discussion writers from Aesthetics, Poetry and Literary Theory fields. The results show that most of the works promote the picture of ideal reader and for this reason, we classified them as Cartesian literary literacy; however, few of these works are related to complexity and transdisciplinarity studies, which led us to call them as complex literary literacy.

인터랙티브 전자책의 스토리보드 기반 독자 이해도 평가법

인터랙티브 전자책에 대한 기존의 독자 이해도 평가 방법들은 대개 이해도 점수를 수치화하는 정량적 평가 방식들로, 개발자나 제작자가 그 의미를 구체적으로 해석하여 반영하기 어렵다. 본 논문에서는 인터랙티브 전자책의 상호작용성, 시각적 특성 및 내러티브 특성에 주목하여 독자의 스토리보드 재구성에 기반한 새로운 이해도 측정 방법을 제안하였다. 실제 독자의 읽기를 통한 이해도 질적 평가를 수행하였으며, 문제가 발생하는 구체적 내러티브 단계 및 상호작용 구성 적절성을 판별할 수 있는 정성적 평가 방법임을 확인하였다. Existing works to measure readers' understanding of interactive e-books have mainly employed quantitative approach which are difficult to get direct interpretation of the evaluation results. Attentive to interactive, visual and narrative features, this paper proposes a new method for measuring readers' engagement by making them to reconstitute a storyboard. Experimenting with real readers, we validated that this method could give a qualitative assessment that allows finding out problematic narrative phases and the adequacy of interaction formation.

David M. Stewart. Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America.

David M. Stewart. <i>Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America</i>.

Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception.

Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception.

Wer waren die Leser und Hörer der Chronographia des Michael Psellos?

The article deals with the position Michael Psellos has taken with regard to the readers/listeners of his Chronographia. The intended readers are, in addition to Constantine Leichoudes and Emperor Michael VII which he addresses directly, the educated people at and around the imperial court. Psellos deals with his story in full command as a sovereign author and by many remarks which guide the readers. It is set out how the six provable real readers of the Chronographia (Michael Attaleiates, Skylitzes Continuatus, Nikephoros Bryennios, Anna Komnene, Ioannes Zonaras and Michael Choniates) have made use of the text.

Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878. EmilySatterwhite. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011.

Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878. Emily Satterwhite. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011.In Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878, Emily Satterwhite takes readerresponse theory a new, invigorating level by examining mail written in response best-selling fiction set in (2). She does so to understand how readers imagined region and what purposes these imagined geographies served for (2). As she explains in methodological essay following her conclusion, instead of speculating about how a hypothetical reader might respond these texts, she draws from real reader responses construct a reception geography of texts she explores. Satterwhite contends that this approach recognizefs] that texts mean different things for readers in different times and different social and geographic positions (229). The strategy that she employs adds a growing trend in American studies that encourages researchers turn cultural artifacts (like fan authors) discover how texts functioned within their own contemporary social milieus.Early in book's introduction, Satterwhite makes clear that her study investigates how stereotypical assumptions about a homogenously white Appalachia factor into her analysis. She contends that her examination of fan mail indicates that best-selling Appalachian-set fiction met white readers' needs and eased their cultural anxieties in at least three ways: it produced Appalachia as an authentic place, offered readers a means of establishing a sense of identity and belonging, and facilitated circulation of power across geographic scales (5). Satterwhite returns this argument several times as she investigates best-selling Appalachian fiction beginning with Mary Noailles Murfree's work from late 1870s and ending with contemporary best-sellers like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (1997). The book also contains several maps that trace not only the broad distribution of admirers of Appalachian-set but also the migration narratives provided by fans in their letters (13). These visual aids support Satterwhite's assertions about wide reach of Appalachian fiction from 1878 present.Satterwhite begins study with a chapter on Mary Noailles Murfree, concluding that Murfree's fiction was popular with two distinctly different sets of audiences: for nonmetropolitan elites, local-color promoted local gentry's pride in those [but also] reinforced a sense of superiority over less privileged locals, and for metropolitan elites, local-color fiction encouraged them appropriate ... [the] stories out of a sense of superiority of modern city over supposedly premodern rural places (52). …